Dispatches From a Culinary Frontier

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

Published: September 20, 2000

BETWEEN carrying on about Ian Thorpe, the young swimmer with feet almost as big as a kangaroo's, and marveling at Sydney's magnificent harbor and opera house, the writers and broadcasters covering the Olympic Games have somehow found time to rave about the food and wine they have discovered in Australia.

About that, at least, they do not exaggerate. Only a generation or two ago, a can of Foster's and a few shrimp on the barbie defined the epicurean horizons of most people down under, but no more. Sydney has become one of the world's great restaurant towns, Australian cuisine is a topic of global interest instead of an oxymoron and Australian wine has long since outgrown the Monty Python troupe's taunts about Perth pink and Nuits-St.-Wagga-Wagga.

But to most Americans, it's all hearsay, as remote as dinner on Mars. Even in the jet age, Australia is many hours and thousands of dollars away, which makes a clutch of new and nearly new Australian cookbooks all the more welcome as guidebooks for the armchair gastronomic traveler. Their publication reflects the world's growing fascination with the culinary scene on the smallest continent, and a couple of them, one in particular, are just as useful at a stove as in an armchair.

What, you may well ask, is Australian cuisine? Tough question. Some cuisines can be defined by the starches on which they rely -- rice in China, for example, pasta in southern Italy and potatoes in northern Europe. Or the cooking fat they use -- olive oil in the Mediterranean, lard in central Europe and butter in northern France. But Australians, like Americans, use a little of this and a little of that.

The reason, of course, is that modern Australian cooking, like modern American cooking, is New World cooking, evolved not from generations of peasant tradition but from the application of Old World techniques to local ingredients by gifted chefs. It reflects ''cosmopolitan influences from everywhere,'' in the words of Australia's leading purveyor of fancy groceries, Simon Johnson.

Until the relatively recent (and by no means universally successful) vogue for fusion cooking in the United States, French and Italian and Chinese and Japanese and Lebanese and Afghan foods have kept mostly to themselves in this country, often modified to meet local tastes but seldom mixed. In Australia, synthesis is the norm. Chefs shamelessly plunder ideas and ingredients from the whole wide world.

As Alan Saunders writes in ''Australian Food'' (Ten Speed Press, 1999), the taste of Australia is ''the flavor of change, adaptation and -- in the very best sense of the word -- compromise.''

Take Janni Kyritsis, the chef at MG Garage in Sydney, who is one of the luminaries featured in Mr. Saunders's book. Greek-born, he cooks red mullet coated with gremolata bread crumbs. Greek enough. But he adds a Sicilian dimension by stuffing the fish with a mixture including currants and pine nuts. Or Stefano Manfredi, who runs Bel Mondo, in my view Australia's best Italian restaurant. He serves pasta, to be sure, but he is as likely to serve it with un-Italian things like abalone and shiitakes as with tomatoes.

The unsung hero of the Australian gastronomic explosion is Gough Whitlam, the former prime minister, who in the 1970's began encouraging immigration by Asians. Today, if Australia is not quite an Asian country, Asia influences what Australia eats to a degree unknown elsewhere in the Western world -- in superb Asian establishments like Gilbert Lau's Flower Drum in Melbourne, possibly the best Cantonese restaurant anywhere, but in Western restaurants, too.

Cheong Liew, who cooks at the Grange, the dining room of the Adelaide Hilton, was born of a Chinese family in Malaysia, which perhaps gave him a head start in melding different culinary traditions. So did his apprenticeship. He worked in Greek, Indian, Southeast Asian, French and Chinese kitchens, and his own restaurant was the first one anywhere, to the best of my knowledge, to perfect a fusion style.

''I can cook a dish the traditional way,'' Mr. Liew said last year, ''but I like to put in an element from somewhere else in the globe to remind people of their own culture. There is a cultural freedom in Australia that accepts this.''

Multicultural cooking works only if it tastes good, and it tastes good only if a discriminating sensibility is at work. Believe me, Mr. Liew's dishes -- like his red snapper, red-roasted in Chinese fashion, with a green Southeast Asian jus of coriander, spring onions and chilies, served with a French-inspired leek fondue -- never cross the very narrow line that divides fusion from confusion.

Tetsuya Wakuda, the Japanese-born chef whom many have tried to lure to the United States, produces food Faberge -- fillets of a perchlike fish known as barramundi, for example, served with peaches, endive, truffle oil and wakame seaweed. (Think Charlie Trotter crossed with Nobu Matsuhisa.) You will find the recipe in Mr. Saunders's book, lacking, alas, any suggestions as to what North American fish might work in case your neighborhood supermarket has run out of barramundi. Mr. Wakuda's forthcoming book, I am told, will be available here soon.

Not that all the chefs who have shaped modern Australian cooking are immigrants. Christine Manfield ranges the world for inspiration for her book, ''Spice'' (Viking, 1999), and for her restaurant, Paramount, in the prosperous Sydney suburb of Potts Point. But she is Australian born and bred, and she proves it with a vertical fantasy consisting (reading from south to north) of a disk of nori omelet, a potato pancake sparked with wasabi, strips of quick-seared kangaroo, horseradish cream and a liberal dusting of chives. (Yes, they sometimes eat kangaroo; no, it's not a staple. Rather more like buffalo here -- lean, healthy, tasty, favored by the cognoscenti rather than rank-and-file.)

Like California, Australia benefits from its climate. It is blessed with tropical and temperate fruits in profusion. It grows vegetables of all kinds, Asian as well as European in origin. Its relatively unpolluted seas, with a wide range of temperatures, are equally bountiful; more than 200 kinds of fish and 90 kinds of mollusks and crustaceans are commercially available.

Some of them are exotic looking, like Coffin Bay scallops, with purple shells and magenta roe. Some sound more exotic than they are. When an Australian recipe calls for ''bugs,'' don't reach for the ants; what's wanted instead are flattish crustaceans, found only off Australia, called either Balmain bugs (Ibacus peronii) or Moreton Bay bugs (Thenus orientalis). Both resemble the European squat lobster.

The abundance of prime ingredients encourages many cooks to opt for simplicity. One of the best at this game is a young New Zealander, Philip Johnson, who for the last five years has run a bistro called Ecco in Brisbane, in subtropical Queensland. His cookbook, also ''Ecco'' (Random House Australia, 1999), is filled with straightforward but tempting dishes like slow-cooked duck with red cabbage, bacon and hazelnuts, and fillet of beef with parsnips, baby leeks and tapenade.

Wouldn't you like to try grilled quail with wet polenta and asparagus sometime soon? Dishes like that -- ''lovingly crafted, basic but perfectly cooked food,'' in the magazine's words -- won Mr. Johnson the 1997 Restaurant of the Year award given by The Australian Gourmet Traveller, one of the country's top food magazines.

But you needn't be a celebrated chef to play in this league. The other night, when I had only a scant hour and a half to make dinner for myself; my wife, Betsey; and four guests, my eye fell upon ''New Food Fast'' (Whitecap Books, 1999) by Donna Hay, an overachieving 30-year-old food writer with two best-sellers already to her credit. It offers sections headed ''10 Minutes (or So),'' ''20 Minutes'' and ''30 Minutes'' -- and I found the timings accurate.

Something light, Betsey said. Mussels poached in a quick broth flavored with ginger and lemon grass, to which I added a chopped hot pepper and a bit of garlic, got us under way. Then came scallops of swordfish sauteed with sage leaves and a shower of grated lemon rind, with a side of very slowly roasted tomatoes with basil, served lukewarm, and kadota figs in vanilla and white port sauce.

My jury approved, and it gave the blue ribbon to the swordfish. Cutting the fish steaks in half horizontally and cooking them in olive oil for a minute on each side produced something much moister and subtler in flavor than grilling the slabs whole over coals.

Had I been feeling more ambitious, I admit, I would have tried something dreamed up by Neil Perry, my favorite Australian chef -- maybe his passion-fruit custard tart or, if I had been feeling truly foolhardy, his king prawn cake and scallops with spicy prawn sauce, a little number with a mere 48 ingredients, many of them Asian (galangal, turmeric, kaffir lime, palm sugar, coconut cream, coriander roots, lemon grass). A slight, ebullient, ponytailed man, he is every bit as fastidious about his raw materials as he is about technique.

Or maybe I would have jumped on a plane for Sydney and headed for one of Mr. Perry's restaurants, either Rockpool, which is formal, or Wockpool, which is more casual and more overtly Asian. Maybe I'd have ordered his aged rump steak, cut two inches thick, rare inside, a crisp smoky crust on the outside, a chunk of anchovy butter on top, plus a bottle or two of Penfolds Grange shiraz to wash it all down. With food and drink like that, who needs a ticket for the Olympics?

Scouting Out the Books

NEW FOOD FAST'' by Donna Hay and ''Australian Food'' by Alan Saunders are available in major bookstores. ''Spice'' by Christine Manfield and ''Ecco'' by Philip Johnson are available at specialty booksellers like Kitchen Arts & Letters, 1435 Lexington Avenue (93rd Street), or online through amazon.co.uk and dymocks.com.au, among others.

SWORDFISH FRIED IN SAGE OLIVE OIL

Adapted from ''New Food Fast'' by Donna Hay

Time: 10 minutes

3 tablespoons fruity extra virgin olive oil

8 large fresh sage leaves

2 teaspoons grated lemon zest

1/2 teaspoon cracked black pepper

4 thin ( 3/4-inch) swordfish steaks.

1. Heat olive oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the sage leaves, lemon zest and cracked black pepper. Saute until sage is crisp, about 2 minutes.

2. Add swordfish, and saute about 1 minute on each side, or until just cooked through; be careful not to overcook. Quickly transfer to serving plates, and drizzle with the oil and sage from the pan. Serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings.

ORANGE, DATE AND CARDAMOM TART

Adapted from ''Spice'' by Christine Manfield

Time: 2 hours, plus overnight refrigeration and 3 hours' cooling

1/2 cup confectioners' sugar

3/4 cup flour

5 1/2 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into cubes

2 large egg yolks

1/2 vanilla bean, split

4 large eggs

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-fine

granulated sugar

Zest of two oranges

1/4 cup fresh orange juice

Seeds from 4 green cardamom pods, ground

1/3 cup heavy cream

18 fresh dates, halved lengthwise.

1. Sift together powdered sugar and flour, and place in food processor. Add butter, and pulse until mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. Add egg yolks, and scrape in pulp from vanilla bean. Blend until dough just comes together in a soft ball. Wrap in plastic film, and refrigerate overnight.

3. Lightly dust a work surface with flour, and roll dough into 10-inch circle. Fold into quarters to transfer to a 9 1/2-inch nonstick tart pan. Unfold and fit snugly into pan, trimming and patching as necessary. Refrigerate 30 minutes.

4. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Prick tart shell all over with a fork, and bake just until dry and golden, about 15 minutes.

6. If edges of the tart shell are already browned, cover with strips of foil to prevent burning. Bake until custard is lightly browned and set, about 30 minutes. Allow to cool at least 3 hours before removing from pan.

2. Prepare a grill, or lightly oil a heavy ridged or flat skillet. Place spinach mixture in a bowl, and set aside. Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil, and blanch green beans until just tender. Rinse under cold water, drain and set aside.

3. Coat lamb chops with char sui sauce, and roll very lightly in peppercorns. Allow meat to rest 30 minutes. Grill or sear over high heat until charred but pink in the center, about 2 1/2 minutes on the first side, and 1 1/2 minutes on the second. Transfer to a plate, cover with a bowl and let rest for 2 to 3 minutes.

4. Heat vegetable oil in a separate skillet, and fry mushrooms until crisp. Add to spinach mixture. Add snow peas and green beans to skillet, and saute for 30 seconds. Add bean sprouts and water chestnuts, and toss just until heated. Add to spinach mixture.

5. To serve, whisk dressing until blended, and add to spinach mixture. Toss gently, and place an equal portion in the center of each of four serving plates. Slice the lamb thinly on the diagonal, and arrange over greens. Serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings.

Photos: CONTENDERS -- Cookbooks from Australia open up another world of fusion flavors, with no need to spend hours and a fortune on a flight to Sydney. (Michael Rogol for The New York Times)(pg. F1); GOLD STANDARDS -- Swordfish with sage, from ''New Food Fast,'' above, and kangaroo fillet atop a nori omelet with wasabi potatoes, from ''Spice.'' (Petrina Tinslay, from ''New Food Fast'' [Murdoch Books]); (Ashley Barber, from ''Spice'' [Viking])(pg. F6)